1. Technical Field
The present invention is generally related to commerce over networks. Particularly, the present invention is related to electronic purses that can be advantageously used in portable devices configured for both electronic commerce (a.k.a., e-commerce) and mobile commerce (a.k.a., m-commerce).
2. Description of the Related Art
Single functional cards have been successfully used in enclosed environments such as transportation systems. One example of such single functional cards is MIFARE that is the most widely installed contactless smart card technology in the world. With more than 500 million smart card ICs and 5 million reader components sold, MIFARE has been selected as the most successful contactless smart card technology. MIFARE is the perfect solution for applications like loyalty and vending cards, road tolling, city cards, access control and gaming.
It is noticed that such enclosed systems are difficult to be expanded into other areas such as e-commerce and m-commerce because stored values and transaction information are stored in data storage of each tag that is protected by a set of keys. The nature of the tag is that the keys need to be delivered to the card for authentication before data can be accessed during a transaction. This constraint makes systems using such technology difficult to be expanded to an open environment such as the Internet for e-commerce and cellular networks for m-commerce as the key delivery over a public domain network causes security concerns.
There is, thus, a need for a mechanism in devices, especially portable devices, functioning as an electronic purse (e-purse) to be able to conduct transactions over an open network with a payment server without compromising security.